At the crossroads of three worlds - capitalist core, periphery and socialist Europe - Greece will surprise the historian with its antinomies, contradictions and abrupt transitions, when its history is finally recorded. I do not mean the familiar history of political events, the State or the dominant classes, which amount to the same thing; but that of the urban subordinate classes, which continue to be underestimated as an object for research. Most of the issues discussed in this book are unrecorded in Greek historiography; the population constituting its focus has remained hidden; and the period of popular spontaneity and creativity has passed irretrievably, leaving a gap in research, which contrasts with its lasting imprint on the structure of Greater Athens (the capital of Greece), Salonica, and other Greek cities.

Important differences among the three broad geo-political regions in Europe are revealed through socio-geographical analysis. Leaving aside the socialist countries, the contrast between North and South will be stressed here. There is a delicate point which renders Greece a crucial case study in such a project. As the country belongs to the eastern of Braudel's (1966) ‘two Mediterraneans’, it has been deprived of autonomous development during medieval times, and continuity has been interrupted in its history by Ottoman occupation. ‘To claim that the considerable obstacles between the two halves of the Mediterranean effectively separate them from each other would be to profess a form of geographical determinism, extreme, but not altogether mistaken’ (Braudel 1966: 134).